Billionaire T. Boone Pickens recently scaled back his plan for massive wind farms – though he’s still taking delivery on those 667 wind turbines he has on order. One of the reasons he gave for the change, besides the price of oil, was transmission problems. High capacity transmission is simply not available.

The coasts consume the majority of the electricity, but some of the best locations for wind farms and solar farms is inland. Practical renewable energy solutions will remain tantalizingly just out of reach until high-capacity cross-country transmission is available. The best way to move high volumes of electricity is via 765 kV. The 765kV grid requires no new technologies, no scientific breakthroughs. We know how to do this today.

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I was at a family reunion over Labor Day weekend, and my cousin Beth (who’s been vegetarian for as long as I can remember), asked my wife and me about our relatively recent conversion (February 2008).

My wife had no trouble tracing her inspiration to the book “Skinny Bitch” and its stories of animal cruelty. After fumbling through an answer, and including the obligatory “My wife’s a vegetarian, which pretty much makes me a vegetarian…”, I began to consider the whys of my (mostly) vegetarianism.
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Bird bath. Gazebo roof. Flying disc. Solar oven. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” taken to extremes can mean some really wicked ideas for satellite dishes. Especially the C-Band dishes and the big TV dishes that were so popular in the 1970s.

My wife and I were visiting Kelley’s Island, Ohio, a couple weeks ago (those glacial gouges are groovy!), and we saw this old C-Band dish mounted upside down on found wood as a sort of cabana. That got me to thinking of all the other dishes out there. There’s got to be a million used dishes floating around out there.

Aside from WoundedMooseTV’s valued documentaries on YouTube, the web has dozens of examples of backyard entrepreneurs stretching their imaginations over dishes of every size and shape (did you see the skateboard ramp?).

If you have any great pics of satellite dishes creatively reused, and the story behind it, we’ll post them here for everyone to enjoy.

Short blog entry for today, but I want to take the opportunity to spread the word about  Earth Hour.  Here’s the deal.  Next Saturday, March 28^th, at 8:30 pm local time, turn your lights off.

 At my house we’re going to go a bit further – we’re going to turn everything off – and we’re going to encourage our neighbors to do the same.  For one hour, we’re all going to reduce our carbon footprint as much as we possibly can. (more…)